(Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, 2009) Gordon, Andrew
From 1900 through the 1920s, Singer put in place its proven selling system in Japan, despite making remarkably little adjustment to local conditions, and with a fair degree of success. But the company was hurt in the long run, with a turning point in the early- to mid-1930s, by its refusal to adapt—as its local competitors did—to the expectations of employees and the limited means of potential customers. Singer’s dramatic rise and fall in Japan reveals ways in which practices of global capitalism are simultaneously transformed and transformative as they take root in particular locales.
